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At war with Catholic Europe, Elizabethan England turned to the Ottomans, finds Jeremy Seal

On a May morning in 1570 a papal bull, nailed to the door of the Bishop of London’s palace, sealed Protestant England’s break with Catholic Europe. But the excommunication of Elizabeth I had another consequence, one that posterity has been slow to acknowledge, and which this timely book is among the first to treat in substantial detail: the isolated English queen’s pursuit of ties with the sultans and shahs of Islamic Turkey, Morocco and Persia.

There is no question that Jerry Brotton’s exploration of “a much longer connection between England and the Islamic world” than is generally appreciated has currency. His canvas takes in places with “tragic resonance” for our age, among them Raqqa, Aleppo and Fallujah. But resisting the temptation to draw parallels between then and now, Brotton crafts a purely 16th-century narrative set on two geographical fronts. We follow pioneer embassies to Constantinople, Marrakesh and Qazvin (the former Persian capital) alongside the growing hold the Islamic world exerted on the English from the time of Henry VIII, a fascination that would find powerful expression in Elizabethan cuisine, fashion and theatre.

The Earl of Dorset, Thomas Sackville, stands on a fashionable Turkey carpet in a 1613 portrait by William LarkinCredit:
Alamy

But it is overseas where the best of the book’s drama takes place. Brotton’s cast of intrepid itinerants – merchant envoys, adventurer spies and maverick chancers – were to prove remarkably resourceful in charming or bribing high-ranking court officials among Turkey’s ruling Ottomans, then at the height of their power, as well as Morocco’s Sa’adian Dynasty and the Safavids of Persia. Chief among these proto-diplomats was William Harborne, who in 1578 successfully petitioned the Grand Vizier to instigate a formal but increasingly warm correspondence between Sultan Murad III and Elizabeth. In just two years Harborne secured for English merchants full commercial rights, or “Capitulations”, which were to last until the Ottoman Empire’s demise in 1923.

Brotton is at his best when he analyses the glue – a mix of expedience and ideology – which bound this “Turco-Protestant Conspiracy”, as it was seen by the outmanoeuvred representatives of Constantinople’s competing commercial powers, mainly the French and Venetians.

Allure:
a 1563 painting
of the city of Eskisehir by the Ottoman miniaturist Nasuh Credit:
Alamy

Muslims and Protestants not only had Catholic enemies in common, chiefly Habsburg Spain, but also shared a profound contempt for idolatry. Brotton quotes extensively from contemporary texts to illustrate the accommodation, even active solidarity, that the two faiths briefly achieved. In a letter to Queen Elizabeth, Murad III praised Protestantism as “the most sound religion” in Christianity, while the Bishop of Winchester returned the favour, rather more conditionally, when he dismissed the Pope as “a more perilous enemy unto Christ, than the Turk; and Popery more idolatrous, than Turkery”. On the defeat in 1588 of the Armada, a Moroccan court historian, lifting a phrase from the Koran, wrote approvingly of the divine wind that had been sent to scatter the infidel Spanish fleet.

Such accord had its footing in trade, with the English supplying the tin on which the Ottomans depended to cast their guns. In what Brotton calls a “symbolic act” of iconoclastic alliance, Protestant merchants even stripped England’s post-dissolution monasteries of their lead roofing and bell metal for shipment to Constantinople. In their dealings with Morocco, the English traded shipbuilding timbers for much-needed saltpetre. Nor was trade with the East exclusively about maintaining the military edge. In a celebrated episode, Elizabeth dispatched a clockwork musical organ that caused the Sultan such delight that he offered the contraption’s inventor, Thomas Dallam, the pick of his imperial harem.

The Rainbow Portrait of Elizabeth ICredit:
Alamy

In turn the English markets were supplied with spices, pistachios and currants, as well as embroideries, damasks, “Turkey carpets” and Iznik ceramics. Portraits of sultans and shahs proved especially popular among England’s ruling class , who often borrowed styles from their flamboyantly dressed eastern counterparts. In her wonderful Rainbow Portrait, Elizabeth herself appears bedecked in an oriental array of jewels and fabrics.

But these aspects receive cursory treatment. If Brotton errs, it is in his over-reliance on the contemporary dramas of Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Shakespeare and other playwrights to explain the “allure and horror” that the Islamic world had for the Elizabethans. This is neither to deny the startling preponderance of “despotic sultans, deceitful Moors, renegade Christians, murderous Jews and vulnerable princesses” in these works, nor that Brotton’s treatment has distinct merits.

Readers will no doubt welcome the historical context, not least his surmise that the character of Othello was probably based on Muhammad al-Annuri, ambassador to Elizabeth’s court, who Shakespeare may have encountered during his six-month embassy to London in 1600. (The real point of the Moroccan’s stay, incidentally, may have been to ascertain whether his compatriots could hike the price on sugar, so favoured by the black-toothed Elizabeth).

Brotton also cites obscure and unperformed plays such William Percy’s inflammatory Mahomet and his Heaven (1601), in which the Prophet is subject to a range of bedroom humiliations, to illuminate Elizabethan attitudes towards faith and race. The problem is that the protracted textual analysis is embedded in indigestible chunks, which are a drag on the book’s lively pace and may alienate general readers.

Even so, there is much in these pages to delight and provoke. Where newly crowned Ottoman sultans secured their throne by having their own brothers and half-brothers strangled, we learn, the shahs of Persia merely had them blinded. Early attempts to make sense of Islamic belief systems are also detailed, with one commentator claiming that the main distinction between Sunnis and Shias lay in the way they trimmed their moustaches.

The Orient Isle is a richly resonant work which not only recasts our understanding of the Elizabethan era but also reveals Islam, crucially, as “part of the national story of England”.